


Things We Hold Onto

by basset_voyager



Category: Daredevil (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Karen-centric, Pre-OT3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 18:59:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6126853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basset_voyager/pseuds/basset_voyager
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Fisk is put away, Karen gets into the habit of walking alone at night.</p><p>[Karen, Matt, and Foggy, between seasons 1 and 2]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things We Hold Onto

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for: references to canon violence, passing references to domestic abuse, self-harm & ableism

After Fisk is put away, Karen gets into the habit of walking alone at night. It’s dangerous, probably - she should know that now, after everything she’s been through. But she walks, retracing the steps she took that night with Foggy or drifting to the office building that stands where Elena’s tenement used to be. Even now that everything is over, it doesn’t feel right to be still. Put one foot in front of the other, Karen. Catch up with them before they catch up with you. 

Sometimes, her thumb is on Ben’s contact in her phone before she remembers she can’t call him. She thinks about leaving him a message anyway and telling herself he’ll get it, wherever he is, but then she remembers that Mrs. Urich probably has his phone now. So she calls Foggy, who always picks up, or Matt, who almost never does. 

When she calls Foggy, it always ends with him insisting she come over. He acts like it’s just because he wants to see her and not because he’s worried, but she doubts even Foggy is all that psyched to hang out with her after she’s gotten him out of bed at 3am. 

“Come on, I’ll lend you my coziest pajamas,” he says. “We can fall asleep in front of the X-Files.” 

They drink beer or hot chocolate (or, on one memorable occasion, beer in hot chocolate), and Foggy makes sure that she can hear him moving around the apartment until she falls asleep. Every time, Foggy asks her if she wants to talk about it. He thinks it ends at what she went through with Union Allied and losing Elena and Ben. She isn’t sure he’d be giving her drinks and offering to listen if he knew the rest. It’s all tangled up in her mind: Danny’s body turns into Ben’s body turns into the man in the glasses, looking down at his chest in surprise as blood blooms under his suit, which must be expensive, why does she always find herself having the numb, useless thought that it must be expensive, and she puts the trigger again and again and - 

“I’m alright,” she tells Foggy. “Just don’t really want to be alone.” 

“I know how that is,” Foggy says, even though they both know he doesn’t, not really. 

So Foggy talks, about work, about movies, about Matt. They always end up back at Matt eventually. Foggy worries about him like he’s a sailor gone to sea, even though he’s only a subway ride away. 

“There’s something going on with him that you’re not telling me,” Karen says. It’s not accusatory, or, at least, she doesn’t mean it to be. She’s not exactly in a position to criticize keeping secrets. 

“It’s - no, it’s just - Matt puts on a good show of being well-adjusted and rational, but underneath that he’s pretty much always having a really rough time,” Foggy explains. “And I feel all this pressure because I’m the only person who knows him well enough to see when he’s struggling and make sure he - and then I feel guilty for feeling that way, and then I worry more, and then I get mad at him, and then I feel guilty about being mad at him, and it’s generally a huge mess.” 

Karen picks at a chip in her mug. “I don’t know. You’re, like, level 10 friends with Matt and I’m pretty sure I’m still hovering around level 3.” 

Foggy laughs. 

“That’s not your fault,” he says. “With Matt, level 3 is an achievement.” 

Karen muses that putting up so many walls seems sad, but then a voice in her head that sounds a little too much like Ben’s says, _glass houses._ She falls asleep to an infomercial about blenders and wakes up with an unfamiliar blanket draped over her shoulders. 

Once, on one of her walks, Karen sees Daredevil - or she thinks she sees him, crouched on the top of a building near the water tower. The silhouette of his head (he has horns now, _horns_ ) is framed by the moon for a fraction of a second before he disappears. Later, Karen doubts she really saw him at all. Sleep deprivation and hope will trick you in all kinds of ways. Still, it’s comforting to think that he’s out there, watching over everyone. Hell’s Kitchen’s vengeful spirit. 

That same night, she actually manages to get Matt to pick up his phone, at around 4 in the morning. She’s so surprised she almost hangs up on him. 

“Hello?” His voice is sharp on the other end. He hasn’t been sleeping. “Karen? Is something wrong?” 

Karen shakes her head, then remembers he can’t see her because they’re talking on the phone, then remembers that he wouldn’t be able to see her anyway. “No, I’m - I just couldn’t sleep. I wanted to hear somebody’s voice. Sorry.”

Somewhere off to Karen’s left, a siren wails. On the other end, Matt makes a soft, pained sound from the back of his throat. She isn’t sure if it’s related to her or something else. 

“Don’t be. It’s okay,” he says. “Where are you? It sounds like you’re on the street.” 

“I’m on my way to the office,” Karen replies, even though she hadn’t really been planning on a destination. 

“Do you want me to meet you there? I’ll meet you there.” It’s not what Karen is expecting to hear, and she nearly laughs. This is the first of these calls he’s picked up in weeks, and in general he’s been pulling back lately, ending every conversation with a return to the curt it’s-work-and-I-am-your-boss tone that Foggy’s never been able to pull off. But that’s Matt, she reminds herself. 0 to 100 and back again so fast you get whiplash. 

Matt’s voice drops to a mumble, and it takes Karen a moment to realize that he’s turned away from the phone to say something to someone else in the room with him. She remembers all of Foggy’s comments about Matt’s never-ending series of casual girlfriends.

“I don’t want to take you away from - anything,” she insists. 

Matt laughs, then coughs. “It’s fine, seriously.” 

She could tell him that no, really, she’s changed her mind about wanting company. It’s hard not to feel bad for whoever’s on the other end getting dropped before the sun’s even come up. Instead, she says: “Okay, as long as you don’t mind.” 

They hang up, and a half an hour later they’re sitting together on the office floor with their backs against Karen’s desk. Both of them are dressed for work - Karen because she never changed between yesterday and today. Matt grimaces as he takes off his jacket. 

“You okay?” Karen asks, though she doesn’t expect much of an answer.

Matt shrugs. “Banged my shoulder on a doorframe at the courthouse yesterday. There’s this random step that I always forget about and it throws me off. It’s not a big deal.” 

It strikes Karen for the first time that she’s never actually seen Matt trip over anything. She remembers what Foggy said about him having “a rough time,” and her mind immediately starts running worst case scenarios: Matt hurting himself on purpose, mostly. It’s hard to envision. If Matt’s not in control - soft-spoken, confident, rational Matt - then what hope is there for anybody else? 

“Still at level 3,” she murmurs. 

Matt cocks his head to the side. “Hm?”

“Nothing. I’m super out of it,” Karen says. Eventually, one of them is going to have to crack first. She wonders who it’ll be. 

“I know some good late night radio stations,” Matt says. “Well. I say _good_...”

They settle on a station of fuzzy gospel music. Matt takes off his glasses and lets his head drop to her shoulder. This brings the amount of times she’s seen his eyes up to five. Not that she’s counting. 

Karen takes a deep breath. “I keep waiting for the nightmares to stop, but they don’t.” The words hang in the air. 

“Yeah,” is all Matt says. “Yeah.”

.

In her free time, Karen does a lot of research about Daredevil. Well, it’s less _research_ and more lurking on forums reading theories and accounts from other people who have seen him. She’s not exactly certain what she’s trying to find; the question of who he is has never particularly interested her. Okay, maybe it does a little. A teeny tiny amount. 

One post says: _the devil of hell’s kitchen appears to position himself primarily as a protector of children - most of the earliest incidents that have been attributed to him involve abused or missing children, and attacks against child abusers are his most violent assaults on record. while it’s difficult to confirm -_

Another post: _At first I thought, what the hell kind of person puts on a mask and picks fights with the mob and the cops? BUt then I realized - I would if I could. So many of us would. This fcking insane guy is all of us._

Another: _look, don’t crucify me for this but he was really hot_

There are thousands of words of analysis of the only video of him that exists that isn’t a grainy cell phone image of a figure in the distance. It’s the security footage, from the night of the bombings. The complete video leaked sometime after the whole thing with Fisk was over. 

_This is a guy incapacitating six armed police officers AFTER HIS HANDS HAVE BEEN CUFFED BEHIND HIS BACK,_ somebody writes. _This is not an amateur. This is a professional fighter with years of training and just generally a seriously scary person. However, I disagree with the conclusion that he’s ex-military because the style is way too idiosyncratic. Look at the second kick at 0:07 -_

Karen sits cross-legged on her couch eating ramen noodles and reading page after page of speculation. She tries not to think too deeply about why. He saved her life. Of course she’s interested in finding out more about him. It’s harder to admit that there’s something about it that would appeal to her regardless - the simplicity of finding the thing that keeps you in fear and hitting it until it breaks.

There’s an entire thread dedicated to the theory that Daredevil doesn’t actually exist at all, another to speculating whether or not he has superpowers, a third to the idea that he secretly works for the government or the Avengers. The second thread leads her to a more general forum for superhero sightings in New York. Mostly it’s people talking about the time they saw Iron Man flying over the Brooklyn Bridge, but there are also a few posts that mention a local PI named Jessica Jones who’s supposed to be able to lift a car with one hand. Sounds like a rumor a PI would start about herself to keep people she’s gotten on the wrong side of off her back, but Karen writes down the name anyway. Her office isn’t that far from Karen’s apartment. 

She should leave it alone. She should leave all of it alone, pack it in, move on. But she’s never been that smart, and it’s better than trying to sleep. 

. 

Sometimes, Matt and Foggy are stifling. They’re still working through something she doesn’t understand and has stopped bothering to ask about. That’s the thing about being friends with people who were friends with each other first - there are always corners you can’t quite get into. Lately, Karen has noticed that when they’re all going somewhere, Foggy will maneuver himself so that Karen is between him and Matt, and Matt will take Karen’s arm instead of his. It occurs to Karen that they might have been sleeping together at some point and broken up, and _that’s_ what all this is about, but then decides that’s something they definitely would have told her. Right? Unless Matt has some sort of weird Catholic thing about it. She isn’t sure how religious he actually is. 

Once, when Karen was eleven, she hid inside one of the kitchen cabinets for an entire afternoon. Wedged in between the Windex and the extra steel wool, she took notes on her parents’ conversations on a pad of paper, by the light that came in slivers through the cabinet doors. 

“Can you believe she still shows up at church?” Karen’s mother more hissed than whispered. “Poor Shirley. If that were my daughter, knocked up by God knows who…”

The next day, Karen pulled her cousin Molly into the shed beside the basketball courts. Molly was Aunt Shirley’s other daughter, and she’d told the same story about Katherine being sick that everyone had heard. Karen expected to feel triumphant for exposing the lie, to impress Molly with her cleverness, but Molly only flushed an angry red.

“What do you have to go around sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong?” she spat, and as she slammed the door of the shed behind her Karen felt nothing but an ugly spreading shame. 

“Everyone has secrets,” Matt says. Foggy rolls his eyes. Karen thinks about Daredevil, and how he must have people who love him. 

A Tumblr post: _PPL WHO AREN’T FROM HELL’S KITCHEN DON’T GET AN OPINION ON DAREDEVIL. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT OR WHAT HE MEANS TO PEOPLE HERE SO STAY. IN. YOUR. GODDAMN. LANE._

Another post that’s just the words “petition for daredevil to punch banksy in the face” has over 50,000 notes. In Hell’s Kitchen, a high schooler is suspended for wearing a t-shirt with Daredevil’s helmet drawn on the front. One morning, Karen pauses on her way to work to stare at some graffiti that has appeared on a brick wall overnight: @COPS: GOD AND DAREDEVIL ARE WATCHING. It’s gone by the next day; she’s never seen the city cover any graffiti up so fast. 

She remembers the night when she first saw him - a man not much taller than her in cargo pants and under armour, his voice ragged with exhaustion. Half of her wanted to get as far away from him as possible and the other half wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him and yell _teach me how to do that._ She doesn’t tell anyone that part. 

Foggy is constantly asking Karen if she’s okay, and Matt has a way of just existing in her general vicinity that implies he’d like to do the same but doesn’t want to be invasive. Karen smiles, but she doesn’t take the mace off her keys. 

In her dreams, the man in the suit opens his eyes and asks in a little girl’s voice, “Why do you have to go around sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong?” 

Sometimes, Matt and Foggy are the only things that keep her from going crazy. 

“Still gunning for that office softball team,” Foggy sing-songs, swinging Matt’s cane like a bat. Matt makes a grab for it, following the sound, but he misses and ends up holding onto Foggy’s shoulder instead. 

“What happened to your actual bat, Foggy?” Karen asks, only half looking up. She’s sifting through the last of the lo mein with her chopsticks, trying her best to avoid the carrots. So what? It’s not like her mother’s here to tell her off. 

Foggy shrugs. “I think I took it home.” 

Matt follows Foggy’s arm until he finds the cane and manages to pry it out of Foggy’s hand. 

“Next person to use this as a dramatic prop has to pay me five bucks,” he says, but he’s grinning. 

“Deal,” Foggy says. “Totally worth it.” 

Matt throws his head back when he laughs. “Bet you look like an idiot, anyway. Karen, back me up here, did he look like an idiot?” Karen makes a show of humming in thought. 

“Yeah, but he looks like an idiot most of the time, so that’s not saying much,” she says. 

Foggy puts his hand on his heart in mock horror. “Never in my life have I been ganged up on like this.” 

They all laugh, and Foggy somehow ends up singing an off-key rendition of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.” Karen bumps knees with Matt under the table, and she nonsensically hopes that, somewhere, the guy in the mask has this too. 

.

Karen visits Mrs. Urich - Doris - once every couple of weeks. They talk about books, mostly. Doris loves old-fashioned mystery novels, and Karen’s trying to work her way through the last two Jane Austens she hasn’t read. Nobody dies in Jane Austen, and usually the only villain is misunderstanding. Mostly because people don’t just sit down and _talk_ to each other. 

Often, Doris is too tired to have a conversation. On those days, Karen sits in the armchair next to her bed and watches television, or she does one of the crosswords that Doris has stacked on her bedside table for times when she’s feeling sharp. Soon all the nurses know Karen’s name, though they seem a little confused about how Doris knows her. It doesn’t seem right to say, “Ben was helping me investigate the people who tried to kill me and that’s what got him strangled to death,” so Karen just smiles and tells them that Mr. Urich was an important mentor to her. 

“Are you a journalist?” The nurses sometimes ask. 

Karen shakes her head and looks at the ground. They assume she’s being modest. Really, it gives her an unpleasant feeling in her stomach to have people ask her who she is or who she wants to be. It feels too late to go back to questions like what she wants to be when she grows up. She’s grown up. This is it. Karen Page is nobody. That’s what she wanted, isn’t it? 

“You’re so young,” Doris tells her. “When I was your age, I hadn’t even decided to get my social work degree yet. It’s never too late to start over.” 

Doris tells her stories, about Ben when he was young and pushy and ready to take on anybody, about her days at the VA, about her teenage hippie years protesting Vietnam. Karen finds herself wanting to write it all down, so she doesn’t forget. What was it that Ben had said? That’s all we are in the end, stories. 

Someday, Karen thinks, all of this will be a story.

“Did I do the right thing?” she asks on one visit, when she thinks Doris is sleeping. 

“Psh,” Doris replies without opening her eyes. “What the hell kind of question is that? Will the next thing you do be the right one - now _that’s_ a question.” 

Karen pictures Doris and Ben at 28, walking down a New York street ready to change the world, and she smiles. 

. 

Nelson and Murdock still doesn’t have very many clients, but what they have is enough to keep them afloat. These days it’s a lot of eviction issues, housing discrimination, the occasional criminal case. A woman who hit her abusive husband over the head with an iron. A shop worker being prosecuted for giving away food the store was going to throw out anyway. Matt and Foggy end up getting paid in food and favors as often as in money. The woman with the iron - Gabriela, who has two kids and a bad back - went to two semesters of art school before her husband made her quit, and she draws them a picture of their office in colored pencil. In the drawing, the place looks full of sunlight, and the plastic plant Karen stuck on the windowsill is alive and blooming. It’s captioned: _to Foggy and Matt and Karen, with thanks._ She shrugs when she drops by to give it to Karen, as if it’s nothing. Foggy has it framed. 

At some point, someone gives Matt a tiny Saint Jude medal on a chain, though Karen isn’t certain who. He keeps it in his pocket and takes it out to fidget with when he’s thinking. 

All the clients they have live in Hell’s Kitchen, and before long Karen finds herself running into people she knows while she’s grocery shopping or doing laundry. There’s Ed, the electrician Matt and Foggy bailed out; Foggy’s cop friend Brett and his mother, Bess; Gabriela, who has a new job working at the dry cleaner with Mira; John and Jia, the couple who run the hardware store on 36th. Even though Karen didn’t grow up here, nobody treats her like an outsider. Maybe it’s because Matt and Foggy are such local boys, so she has the stamp of trust by association. She gets the occasional side gig babysitting people’s kids or helping someone around the house. 

During slow weeks, Matt and Karen and Foggy will spend hours sitting on the office floor listening to Cabin Pressure or talking like kids at a sleepover. Matt and Foggy have so many college stories that they don’t notice if Karen never tells any herself. 

“So there was this professor, right, this fucking ancient dude with wispy hair and a literal bow tie - ” Foggy says. 

“ - and his voice was like an old radiator rattling, it was awful - ” Matt interrupts. They’re sitting on the floor next to Karen’s desk again. Karen has her head on Matt’s knee, and Matt keeps reaching out to touch Foggy when he laughs, as if to make sure he’s still there. For now, all the strange distance between them seems to have closed. 

“So, this professor is on Matt’s ass for weeks about being late to class, even though the elevator is broken - ”

“ - and the stairs are uneven and narrow and always loud and nobody gets out of my damn way - ”

“Yeah, they were a nightmare even if you could see - ”

They pick up the threads of the story from each other as if they’ve told it a thousand times, which, Karen reminds herself, they probably have. 

“He pulls me aside and goes, ‘This tardiness is unacceptable and it will affect your grade,’’” Matt continues, doing an imitation of the professor’s voice that makes Foggy fall forward in silent laughter. “And I tell him that I’m sorry but they haven’t fixed the elevator yet and this building has challenging stairs, and I remind him of my accommodations like I’m supposed to - and he a) tells me I’m using being blind as an excuse and b) implies that I’m not actually that blind, even though it’s on record with the school that I have literally no sight at all, and to top it all off he tells me I have a - ” Matt and Foggy chorus the next two words together: “ - bad attitude.” 

Matt tries to go on but keeps giggling, so Foggy picks up the rest. 

“So Matt, passive aggressive little shit that he is - ”

“ - pfft, hey - ”

“He walks away without saying anything at all, right? And then he gets this one art student girl we know to make him a t-shirt that says ‘My other disability is a bad attitude’ and wears it to _every single class_ after that. Not one class, not a couple of classes - _every class,_ even after they fixed the elevator and he stopped being late. While, of course, continuing to get a perfect score on everything. The professor - did he try to stop calling on you?” 

“Yeah,” Matt says. “But he couldn’t keep that up without the administration getting involved, and he knew he couldn’t actually dock my grade without me getting the administration involved, so eventually he had to give up. I got an A, and he got everybody knowing that he’d been an asshole.”

“And it turned out he’d done stuff like that to people before, but he’d gotten away with it because nobody felt like they could say anything. There was a whole flood of complaints after that,” Foggy concludes. 

“Wow,” Karen says. “I had no idea you were such a rebel, Matt.” She punches him lightly on the arm.

“I’m not, I just…” Matt trails off. 

“Have a chronic need to fight everyone about everything?” Foggy finishes for him. 

Matt laughs. “Yeah, maybe.” 

Why do you have to go around sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong? 

Slowly, the office fills with things left by clients: photographs and knitted scarves and bad mixtapes on thumb drives. Karen swaps out the fake plant for a real one. God, at the end of the day, she's so lucky to have found this place.

“Do you think we’re making a difference?” she asks Foggy. Why do you have to - 

He puts his hand on her shoulder. “Yeah, I think we are.” 

Karen still walks through the city at night. There are things she wishes she could forget, leave on the curb with the garbage and walk away from forever. Part of her wants to leave Hell’s Kitchen entirely. She could get on a train out of New York and start over someplace new. Again.

_one of the most important things about daredevil is that he shines a light on our apathy.everybody thinks we can't make a difference & that nothing will ever change, but look at what this ONE GUY did. one guy, not an alien or a supersoldier or whatever, but one of us. whatever happens (and shit's gonna happen) we know now that we can beat it. us, hell's kitchen. we've all got to fight - not with our fists, but w/ our voices & our mutual support as a community - to create a world that doesn't need him anymore._

The city is still here. Karen is still here. They announce Fisk’s trial date on television when Karen, Matt, and Foggy are sitting at the bar at Josie’s. Karen feels warm from a little too much beer and Matt and Foggy pressed in on either side of her. While the bar erupts into whoops and applause, Karen takes Matt’s hand, and the saint’s medal presses into both of their palms. 

**Author's Note:**

> In real life, the ["my other disability is a bad attitude" t-shirt](http://criptiques.com/2015/05/15/criptiques-t-shirt-takeover/) was created by [Criptiques](http://criptiques.com/).
> 
> edit: I wrote this before season 2 came out and then the thing about them getting paid in food actually happened in canon, nice


End file.
